Christmas 2015 - Ugly Sweater Nails

I hope everyone had a great Christmas.  I can't believe it's over already.  I only did one Christmas themed look this year.  And actually, I ended up doing it twice.  The week of Christmas got a little hectic.  I needed to redo my nails, I had already been wearing the design for a week, so they were starting to look a little beat up.  But I just didn't have the time, or energy, to play around with a new look.  I still had all the same supplies out, and since I liked how they came out so much the first time, I just decided to redo the same design.  

The base was sort of a recycled look for me.  I had used this same tape mani combo several years ago during the holidays, but for a snowflake look instead.  I started with 2 coats of China Glaze Poinsettia, then one coat of China Glaze Ring In The Red.  I top coated with Seche Vite and made sure it was completely dry before taping off my nails on the diagonal with just regular scotch tape.  Then I applied a thicker coat of China Glaze Glittering Garland, top coated and let dry before stamping.  The sweater stamp is from MoYou London Festive Collection 06, and I stamped the design with white Konad Special Polish.

I also gave my nails a little trim this month because of a few broken corners.  I wasn't thrilled with the idea of making my nails shorter, but in hindsight, it really worked out to be good timing; I don't think this stamp would have fit as well on my nails at the length they were before I filed them back.  

I was really happy with how this look turned out.  I only had to redo a couple nails each time I wore this, because I thought I stamped the design a little crooked a time or two.  I always top coat my polish before I stamp, that way I have a little barrier of protection over my base polish in case I need to re-stamp a nail.  I can carefully wipe off the stamping polish with polish remover and a q-tip, without completely messing up the polish below.  And I was happy to pull out Ring In The Red from my melmer for the first time in a while.  That is still probably one of my favorite China Glaze glitters.

St. Patrick's Day 2015

Happy St Paddy's Day!!!  St. Patrick's Day is one of my favorite holidays, and I'm really not sure why.  I'm not even Irish.  But I do love green and, thanks to the influence of my older sister, I've always had a love of Ireland while growing up.  For St. Patrick's Day this year, I finally busted out my bottle of the Extra Fine version of Lacquistry Amazeballz, and combined it with a little stamping on my other nails.

I love the extra fine version of Amazeballz even more than the original.  The formula is incredibly smooth, and you could almost get away with a single coat.  I did apply a second coat just to even up the coverage though.  For my other nails, I applied 2 coats of KBShimmer Eyes White Open and topped that with 1 coat of Sephora by OPI It's Real 18K Gold top coat.  Over that I stamped a shamrock and clover pattern from Bundle Monster plate BM-723 using Konad Special Polish in green.  I topped everything with one coat of Seche Vite.

I only wish that I had applied 2 coats of the It's Real 18K Gold top coat on my index and pinky nails, instead of just 1 coat.  With a close-up view like in the blog pics, it's pretty easy to see it on the nails.  But in real life, it's hard to spot that the gold flakes are even there.  I think a second coat would have made them much more noticeable, but I still love how it turned out.  Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day!

OPI Feel the Mo-heat-oes & Roses

I posted a picture of this matte nail design several days ago on Instagram, planning to write up a post, and then...it just never happened.  Bad Sarah.  But, I was determined to not put it off any longer, so here I go.

For this look, I started with 2 coats of OPI Feel the Mo-Heat-oes.  It's such a beautiful shade of green.  For a leafy background, I stamped part of a design from Pueen plate PUEEN73 using Konad Special Polish in green.  The roses are a single rose design from PUEEN14, which I just stamped multiple times, in random spots.

The colors used for the roses were all recent purchases from Rica Nail Polish on Etsy.  Lavender Lotus, Pinky Promise and Ain't It Peachy? are all stamping polishes but also serve double duty because, unlike Konad stamping polishes, you can apply any of Rica's stamping polishes just like regular polish and wear them alone.

I had actually started out wearing this for a day with regular, glossy top coat and felt really "meh" about the whole look.  I'm so glad I decided to try it matte, because applying a coat of OPI Matte Top Coat really brought the whole look together and I went from meh to completely loving it.  In case you're curious though, here are a few shots I took that first day, when it was glossy.

Still pretty, but definitely not as nice compared to how it looked with the matte top coat.  Here's one last look at it matte!

China Glaze Grass Is Lime Greener plus stamping

My nails are starting to gain some length back, but I still have a couple manicures to post from when they were a little bit shorter.  Today's post is just some abstract stamping I had done on top of China Glaze Grass Is Lime Greener, from the Spring 2014 City Flourish Collection.

Grass Is Lime Greener was a bit chalky, but I didn't have a very hard time with it like I had read about in a few reviews.  I was relieved since I had bought it before I start seeing others post about it being really streaky and hard to even out.  I did end up applying 3 coats, but application wasn't troublesome at all.  I just made sure to take my time with each coat.  The stamping was done using Konad Special Polish in green and a design from Pueen plate PUEEN16.

I liked this manicure much more in person than how it comes across in the pics.  And even with having to be a little more careful with the application, I'm really glad I picked up this shade from the City Flourish Collection.

KBShimmer Partners In Lime Goes Wild

Corny title, I know.  But it was the first thing that popped in my head, so I'm going with it!  After swatching polishes from the KBShimmer Early Summer 2014 Collection, I loved Partners In Lime so much that I put it back on.  I wore it for a couple days just by itself, no top coat.  But then I decided to add a little stamping, and once again I was drawn back to the tiger/zebra print pattern on Bundle Monster plate BM-223.  I thought about going with a darker green to stamp with, but opted instead to use black for something a little more bold.

After stamping, I finished the look off with two coats of Seche Vite.  The first coat made the mani fairly smooth but, because of the texture, I decided to go for a second coat of Seche Vite to get a perfectly smooth finish.

As much as I loved Partners In Lime without top coat, it was so beautiful with top coat.  I loved the way the different color glitters sparkled between the black animal print design, especially when I was out in the bright sunlight.

KBShimmer Early Summer Collection 2014 - The Textures

Press Sample

Today is the launch of the new KBShimmer Early Summer 2014 Collection and I have the last 3 polishes I received for review to show to you.  These are the new textures and I have to say they are pretty cool.  The polishes are not super textured.  They contain quite a bit of glitter so they are chunkier compared to something like Zoya's regular PixieDust polishes, but they are not as chunky as the newer Zoya Magical PixieDust shades.  The textures all have a jelly base and dry to a semi-matte finish.  I got full coverage with all three shades with just 2 coats, but I did dab on a bit more polish in a few spots that seemed to not get as much glitter.  And I wore these without top coat, to keep the textured finish.  First up is my absolute favorite of the entire Early Summer Collection, Partners In Lime.

I love this bright lime jelly base, containing lime green, aqua and gold holographic glitters.  I wore this polish again after swatching but with top coat and some stamping, and the glitter really made the whole design pop.  I'm hoping to get a separate post up on that mani in the next few days.

The 2nd texture polish is a bright turquoise called She Twerks Out.

She Twerks Out is full of holographic glitters in teal, lime green, aqua, and violet.  Really easy application in just 2 coats, with just an extra dab or two near the tips to cover a few spots of visible nail line.

The last of the 3 textures is a bright purple called Too Pop To Handle.  The jelly base in this was more opaque, I applied two coats and didn't feel like there were any spots I needed to touch up.

Too Pop To Handle contains violet, magenta, pink and aqua holographic glitters.  It had a smooth formula, as did all three of the textures.  And all three, when dry, had the same degree of texture to their finish.

I have to say that at first I was a bit worried when I heard KBShimmer was releasing some textured polishes, just because there are so many textured polishes out there already.  But I ended up really liking these three textures a great deal, especially because of the multi-colored glitters mixed in.  I've only tried top coating Partners In Lime, but I had great results so I plan to try it out with the other 2 textures and use them as a base for some nail art in the near future.  The texture polishes retail for $8.75 each.  The textures, as well as the entire Early Summer 2014 Collection, are available for purchase starting today at KBShimmer.com.

*Polish sent for honest review.  Review contains only my personal opinions.*

St. Patrick's Day Skittles

I'm always jealous of skittle manicures.  I love them when I see them, but my brain goes completely blank if I try to create one of my own.  I can never think of designs that will be cohesive and so I usually scrap the whole idea and do something else.  But I was determined to do skittle nails for St. Patrick's Day this year, and I think I actually pulled it off.

I'm really happy with them, I think they turned out pretty damn cute!  I already had a basic idea in my head for what to put on 2 or 3 of my nails, so I started there and came up with the rest as I went along.

I started with 2 coats of China Glaze White On White on every nail.  On my index finger, I stamped an argyle pattern from Konad plate m60, using Konad Special Polish in pastel orange.  For the Irish flag, I used striping tape to mark off the nail into thirds, then used OPI Don't Mess With OPI for the green stripe, and OPI Where Did Suzi's Man-Go? for the orange stripe.

For the nail on my ring finger, I used Konad Special Polish in green to stamp the larger shamrock from Winstonia plate W105.  Then I used the two tiny shamrocks from the shamrock design on Bundle Monster plate BM03 and randomly stamped them around the rest of the nail.  And on my pinky nail, I used dotting tools to randomly dot Don't Mess With OPI and Where Did Suzi's Man-Go? around the nail in 3 different sizes.

Finally, on my thumb, I double stamped the plaid pattern from Konad plate m60, first using the Konad green Special Polish and then the Konad pastel orange.  The plaid is a little wonky but the Konad full nail patterns are a little small for my thumbnail, so it was a bit hard to stamp it smoothly while trying to make sure I had it lined up on my nail just right.  In retrospect, I probably should have put the plaid on another nail, like my pinky, and dotted my thumb instead.  But by the time I decided on doing the plaid design, all my other nails were already finished.

In real life though, looking at it from a distance, the plaid looks much better.  And I'm not expecting anyone to be grabbing my hand to get in nice and close like how it's zoomed in tight in the above picture, so I'm satisfied with it.  And I absolutely love the overall look of all 5 designs together.  If I had to choose though, I think the dots would be my favorite.

Mantis Shrimp and Zoya Mitzi Glitter Gradient

Here I go with Zoya Mitzi again.  I love green in general, it's my favorite color.  But I really adore obnoxious shades of green like this.  I realized this even more the other day as I looked around the room and realized that my cell phone case, my laptop mouse and even my hair brush are all this exact same color green.   As usual, Mitzi was streaky, so it took 3 coats to get full, even coverage.  The reason for pulling Mitzi out of the stash again, despite her streaky ways, was that I thought it would make a great base for a glitter polish called Mantis Shrimp.

Mantis Shrimp is a glitter combo that a friend in a Facebook group made for herself.  We all went crazy over it, for good reason, and Sarah agreed to make a few more bottles for those in the group who were interested.  If you're not familiar with what a mantis shrimp is, check out the inspiration behind the polish on The Oatmeal.  And while you're at it, check out Sarah's own Facebook page, My Lacquer Family.  The glitter pairings that she comes up with are just brilliant.

I thought a glitter gradient would be a fun way to layer Mantis Shrimp over Mitzi.  I also needed an excuse to practice the technique because my previous attempts at glitter gradients have been just all sorts of fail.  But this one turned out awesome!  I was so happy with the final results.

I have seen many posts by other bloggers on glitter gradients, all explaining generally the same technique.  But the one that seemed to help me the most is a post from just a few weeks back by Lucy's Stash, which includes a video tutorial.  The video is actually an update to another tutorial she posted a little over a year ago.  I highly recommend checking out both videos.  They definitely helped me.

Color Club The Wanderlust Collection

I have a few manicures saved on my computer that I just never got around to posting before and this is one of them.  I think I mentioned these back in November yet when I posted my autumn pumpkins design.  The manicure itself is even older than that, I did this back in September using all 4 polishes from The Wanderlust Collection by Color Club.

The Wanderlust Collection is a Birchbox exclusive.  I stopped my Birchbox subscription quite a while ago, but I had some points built up on my account and I really loved the swatches I saw online when this collection came out.  I had missed out on it when it first was released, but it eventually came back into stock, so when it did I used my points towards buying the set.  I ordered two sets actually, since the bottles were minis, and I'm glad I did because I love all 4 colors.  The nude color I used for my base is called Mod in Manhattan and this was two coats.  

For the design, I just used two different sized dotting tools and randomly dotted the other 3 colors in the collection.  The neon coral color is called Reign in Spain, the lavender shade is called Pardon My French and the bright green is called London Calling.  Once the dots had dried, I topped everything with a coat of Seche Vite.

And here's a rare shot of my thumb because this was my favorite.  I did my thumb first and tried to repeat the general pattern on the rest of my nails, but they didn't quite have the same curve as on my thumb.  I chalk that up to my thumbnail being wider than the rest of my nails, so I had a little extra room to work with.

Application was super smooth for Mod in Manhattan.  I haven't worn the other 3 colors yet, other than in this design, but I really need to soon, especially that green!

Falling Leaves

I tried to do some turkey nail art this past week for Thanksgiving, I really did, but I just couldn't get inspired.  I really had no clue what to put on my nails actually.  All I knew was that my bottle of Zoya Mitzi happened to be sitting out on my nightstand and I felt like I needed to use it.  After looking through my stamping plates, I decided it might make a good background for some random leaves in Autumn colors.

Zoya Mitzi is a matte finish and it seemed a bit streaky to me.  I needed 3 coats to get it perfectly even.  The leaves all came from different plates: Red Angel plates RA-118 and RA-121, and Winstonia plate W113.  Pardon the crappy cell phone picture below.  I just took this as a reference shot so that when I got around to writing this, I wouldn't have to dig out my plates again to get the numbers.  But I might as well just include it in the post.  

The polishes used for stamping were Konad Special Polishes in green, pastel orange, dark orange and dark red.  Sometimes I dropped blobs of all 4 colors onto a leaf, other times I used just 2 or 3 of the colors.  I also experimented a bit with mixing the colors with a toothpick on the plate before scraping.  But the scraping action itself would also blend the colors inside the leaf patterns.  

For placement, I just stamped the leaves randomly on each nail.  I didn't like all the open space between the leaves, so to fill it in a bit, I used a toothpick and added some dots using the same Konad polishes.  

This definitely turned out to be one of my all time favorite looks.  I wore it for the whole week, but I'm still a little sad to take it off!  

Autumn Pumpkins

Have you ever had an idea for a design but it didn't work out the way you had wanted it to?  That's what happened with this manicure.  Except that what I thought was a problem at first, ended up making the final design even better than my original idea.

The plan was to take a design from Bundle Monster plate BM-H11 and place green polish over the leaves, two different shades of orange over the pumpkins and scrape, then stamp.  I've mixed colors when scraping on other designs, so easy, right?  Well...not so much.  At first, the colors kept mixing each time I scraped off the excess polish.  It was annoying me in the beginning, but after a few test stamps on a piece of paper, I started to like the way that each pumpkin looked a little different.  So I decided to just go with it and try it on my nails that way.

When I was stamping my right hand, I played around a bit starting in the middle of the design instead and scraping from the middle of the design outward to the edges.  It took about 2 to 3 scrapes in different directions, but it did prevent the colors from mixing so much.  But as it turned out, I really liked the pumpkins with the mixed polishes more.  The pumpkins where the polish mixed looked more natural.  They reminded me of real pumpkins that still were in the process of ripening.  Some had a few green spots, some were mostly orange and "ripe" and some were almost completely green.  I think my favorite pumpkin turned out to be one on my middle finger, which was almost all green with just a hint of orange running horizontally through the center.

It was a reminder to me that not everything has to be perfect.  I was getting frustrated in the beginning when the green was bleeding into the pumpkins each time I scraped the plate.  But the blending of the orange and green polishes is actually what made me love this manicure in the end.

For the stamping, I used Konad Special Polishes in green, dark orange and pastel orange.  The base color used for this look was Color Club Mod In Manhattan, from the Birchbox exclusive Wanderlust Collection, which I purchased this past summer.  I have a design from back in September, using the whole collection, that I have yet to post.  But you can expect to see that uploaded soon, along with a few other designs from Sept/Oct that I had skipped over.